


What Do You Do After the End, or, Women's Work

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), mad max - Fandom
Genre: F/F, F/M, Family Feels, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 19:21:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21379237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: He should have gone to Valhalla. He should have been there, at the chrome gates, with their fire fountains and the drums announcing his triumphant arrival. He would have died Witnessed a dozen times over.Instead, the leading party ignored his shouts about the bloodbag’s boot; then when the big pile-up happened, the last thing he remembered was the sound of crushing metal, of too many engines revved too high to ever stop.~This is not a story about Slit.!!! IMPORTANT NOTICE!!! If you read this on a paid app, you have been swindled! It is originally hosted on archiveofourown.org and can be searched and read there FOR FREE!!!Please come visit the website and comment, and let me know if that is how you found me!
Relationships: Capable/Nux (Mad Max), Cheedo the Fragile/The Dag (Mad Max)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Tells of the Wasteland





	What Do You Do After the End, or, Women's Work

**Author's Note:**

> True story, lead poisoning leads to lower IQs, raised aggression issues, learning disabilities, and a slew of other health problems! This information is relevant to the story, i promise.

He should have gone to Valhalla. He should have been there, at the chrome gates, with their fire fountains and the drums announcing his triumphant arrival. He would have died Witnessed dozens of times over.

Instead, the leading party ignored his shouts about the bloodbag’s boot; then when the big pile-up happened, the last thing he remembered ws the sound of crushing metal, of too many engines revved too high to ever stop.  
He held his lance aloft.  
The car twisted to the right and HE was thrown to the left, toppling sideways over the rail of the lancer’s perch; the earth tilted on its axis, an when he hit the dirt he heart a weird crunch that WSN’T metal, and then his left arm wouldn’t move right when he went to push himself upright.  
And then a piece of something big and heavy and still very much on fire fell on him, and everything went black.

HE remembered fits and snatches, after that.  
Waking up to someone with a lot of cloud-colored hair leaning over him, turning his head between sharp, deft hands. Someone was talking but his ears felt like he’d just had two thundersticks go off right over his shoulders. 

Scavengers! He worked his right arm, trying to get it loose enough to swing, but his muscles felt like he’d been melted. Determined not to die soft, he tried at lest to roll over, to get at another of his knives. 

Something heavy and hot pinned him across his back, though, and his feet scrabbled uselessly against dry, loose sand, finding no purchase. 

His mouth was full of sand. The same someone with the hair turned to someone else--a dark human-shaped blob he could only vaguely see against the white sky--and why was the sky white? How long had he lain there?--and then the pressure he hadn’t known he’d been feeling was gone.  
He took a huge, rattling breath, but still found he couldn’t move.

He took another desperate breath, and then had a moment of horror a the whole world went white. He had enough time to fear dying soft, to know he would never stand before the chrome gates, before his vision blurred out completely.

~

“Thought I was your lancer,” Slit spat. “Now look at you, rust traitorshit, fuckin’…” he devolved into mutterings. His arm ached something fierce, but of course they wouldn’t just let the Organic come look at him. Maybe the bone was broke; he didn’t know. When the car had flipped before hitting the pileup, he’d been flung clear, he hadn’t turned to grab a handrail or anything. Stupid mistake of his; damn and rust him for it. If he’d managed to stay on the car, he’d be in Valhalla by now, kneeling, saluting the Immortan Joe. 

He moved his hand away from his arm the moment he realized he’d been holding it. Showing weakness was an invitation for someone to come and pound it out of you, and he wasn't much interested in scrapping with Nux. Not now. 

But Nux didn’t even laugh at him or tease him.  
He just shifted a little on the stool, his head still bowed. The sight of him without his chalk made Slit’s skin crawl, his stomach clenching in weird roiling waves. Slit did not get spooked; he DID the spooking! Nux had traitored the Immortan Joe and he and all the other Warboys had been dug out of the wreckage in that damned canyon like fat grubs out from under a rock--now he was walking around shamefully bare-faced, talking with the Immortan’s breeders--TALKING with them! When most Warboys were never even allowed to lay eyes on them!

It made his blood boil. His stomach kept clenching on itself, the pain the weird-bad kind. He remembered his rage, snarling again before launching into another rant.  
“I had the bloodbag’s boot! ME! They should’a taken me, then we coulda got those traitorin’ breeders an’ it’d all be like normal times. An’ YOU! Look at you, fuckin’ traitor filth! Fuck you! FUCK YOU! YOU WERE S’POSED TO BE MY DRIVER! WE WERE S’POSED TO RIDE INTO VALHALLA, SHINY AND CHROME!” 

And now his throat was shot, raw and bloody-feeling from all the screaming. Had this been sixty, seventy days earlier he might have cuffed a smaller, weaker Warboy and stolen his canteen to have a drink. Now he didn’t even know what to do to get water. 

“Joe wasn’t sendin’ us to Valhalla,” Nux said quietly. “Joe wasn’t sendin’ us anywhere good. I…I had some time to do some thinkin’. Capable’s showin’ me how to read the wordburgers! They’re treasures, from Before. From before Joe, even! There’s so much we don’t…we didn’t know. So much Joe didn’t tell us.” he paused; Slit could only growl, though the sound made his throat feel like he’d eaten glass and was trying to slowly puke it back up. “And Imperator Furiosa said one of the desert women, the Vuvalini, she’s got some kind of healin’ hands, an’ she’s gonna make us full-life!”

Slit swallowed, his chest working like a bellows just trying to contain the fury. If he’d been free, he’d have jumped Nux, grabbed him by the neck, and shaken him til his bones rattled.  
He could only manage a vicious, sharp whisper, instead of the roar he wanted. “You’ll believe anything they tell you, won’t you? Stupid traitoring filth.”

Nux sighed and then slowly stood up, leaning on the crutch. After a moment of looking down at Slit silently, he turned and slowly limped away. 

~

“He’s still frothing-mad,” Nux said. “Wouldn’t even let me get close.”

The Dag scowled, then wrinkled her nose. “Stupid schlanger better let someone get close, ‘fore his arm rots off,” she said.  
One of the Vuvalini made a noise of agreement.  
“That one’s a wild dog,” the old woman said. “Might have been best to put him out of his misery where we found him.”

“No!” Nux said. Then, looking amongst the women's’ faces in the room, he clasped his hands nervously in front of himself, fidgeted his fingers, and spoke again. “He’s…he’s my lancer. I can’t…you can’t have a driver without a lancer…”

Capable laid her hand on his arm gently. “Nux, you don’t have to…to do war anymore,” she said. “And if he doesn’t know how NOT to do war…” she trailed off, but looked away, and the look passed through the whole room.

Toast felt bad for him—actually felt BAD for a Warboy—but it occurred to her that the Warboys didn’t know what do to wit peace any more than they, the Sisters, knew what to do with war.  
Furiosa had made them obsolete, old-model, and now they, and everyone else, were wondering what to do with all of them.

~

It felt better, up Topside.  
Topside was where the green was, where you could, if you sat down, pretend that it went all the way to the horizon, like in the Before. Miss Giddy had described something called a ‘meadow’, with green as far as you could see, and ‘forests’, with more trees than you could ever count.  
Furiosa had told them that the Green Place was like that, too. That it was real.

Looking now at the stretch of green, she felt slightly duped; as if she had been stupid all along to believe anything so fantastic could exist.  
Even if it HAD existed, once. 

~

Down in the Mess, Toast ducked into a small alcove just off the main mess corridor.  
The whole place had a smell of overheated iron; down the center of the entire hall there was a long narrow channel filled with smutty, smoldering grease flames. In some places there were metal grates tossed over it, used like a grill.  
The light came from shop-lanterns overhead, strung along a length of ancient cord so crusted with dust and grime that it looked like some kind of root. 

Warboys crouched to either side of the channel, in knots of two and three. Most of them were roasting crickets on barbecue sticks; here and there one lucky fellow out of a bunch would have a few grasshoppers or even a lizard speared on one of the narrow metal barbecue skewers they kept around. 

One of them was sitting within easy earshot of her. He was thin and rawboned, with hollow cheeks and very dark eyes; he was wearing a ratty gray bandanna tied around his forehead, an was picking the legs off a skewer full of crickets, muttering between bites. Lines of intersecting perpendicular scars covered both sides of his chest--his pectoral muscles, she remembered from a wordburger about the human body. She realized it was a stylized map, and wondered what it was, whether or not it led anywhere. 

“I heard Nux talkin’ with one of the Women. --From outside, not one of the Wi--the Sisters.”  
“You ain’t got to kiss their arses if they ain’t even around,” someone else said. He was unpleasant looking, bloodshot eyes ringed with sooty black, beneath a pair of goggles that reminded her of Nux’s. 

“Ain’t arse-kissin’ if it’s the truth,” the one with the bandanna said hotly.  
Someone else she couldn't see clearly chimed, “I heard one’a them women is an Organic Mechanic, better’n our old one. Nux ain’t even got his lumps no more, ‘cause she cut ‘em off.”

A gasp ran through the group.  
The one with the goggles snorted and said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  
“It’s true,” the one with the bandanna said. “Saw ‘im myself yesterday. Fresh stitches, no lumps. They say he ain’t half-life any more, either.”  
Goggles looked shocked, to hear that. But then he stuffed a charred cricket into his mouth, looking way. He muttered, “Slammed the gates of Valhalla in his face, then. Poor bastard.”

More low mumbling. The others shifted around, and some new people ran up to sit with the others, cross-legged on the stone floor.  
Bandanna gave Goggles a furious look, but smoothed it off; he picked the legs off another cricket before sliding it off the skewer and tossing it into his mouth. 

Toast sighed and then hurried on her way. She did not encounter anyone else in the halls, not so much as a stray Warpup. 

~

Later, up in the Dome, the Sisters made a fire with a little oil and some precious chips of dried savory-scented bark, gathered from one of the trees up Topside. They had a little brazier made of an old, old ammunition drum, which had an opening cut in one side for fuel, and pretty star-shaped ventilation holes punched in its sides.  
Nux sat squirming and swaying next to a laughing Capable, delighted that he’d ever be able to try such a delicacy; they had grasshoppers fattened on sweet herbs, with greens, and some berries so sweet it almost hurt their teeth to eat them.  
Dag was feeding some to Cheedo, who accepted them with her usual delicacy; only now she was not hiding her affection for the other woman so much as expressing her own real shyness. They held hands and leaned on one another, talking quietly between themselves.

Looking between Capable and Nux and the Dag an Cheedo, Toast felt a twinge of something—some hurt, almost like regret, or sadness.

This passed quickly when she looked over at Furiosa.  
Furiosa, sitting bracketed between two Vuvalini, smiled three times and once even actually LAUGHED once. Clean-faced, she looked healthier and happier than Toast had ever seen her, since meeting her. 

Toast sat for the entire meal, waiting for a good time to speak, to tell Furiosa what she’d overheard, yet not wanting to disturb the cozy environment. 

They all deserved happiness, deserved their rest. Yet the anxiety of the rumors swirling--literally just below--made her tense and unhappy the whole meal.

Capable nudged her gently after awhile.  
“You all right? You’ve barely eaten!”  
Toast managed a small smile that she knew was unconvincing. “It’s nothing. Just thinking about something I heard earlier.”

~

“The Warboys are talking about things. Down in the Mess,” Toast said, unhelpfully. She frowned and then amended her statement, “Talking about Joe and all the shit he made up…all the lies he told them.”  
Furiosa's face was very carefully blank.  
“What were they saying?” she asked.  
“Word about Joe’s lies is getting around. Some of them don’t seem to fully believe it, though—that they can be healed, that they’re only half-life because he made them poison themselves.”  
Furiosa nodded slowly. “What else?”

Then Toast hesitated. “They…some of them don’t seem to WANT to live longer. Or to be healthy.”  
Furiosa shook her head. “They wouldn’t. Joe’s bullshit lies are hooked too deep under their skin.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Toast. I want to thank you for gathering this information. But I have to warn you that you need to be careful.”  
Toast shook her head. “I went dressed up like…like one of the Vuvalini. But even when they see Capable with Nux, they seem almost afraid of her. They look at her in little glances and sips, like they’re afraid to be caught staring outright.”

Furiosa laughed, then, but it wasn't a cheerful sound. “That’s because Joe beat it into them that he’d kill anyone who looked at you all. Old habits die hard.” she paused. “You should cherish that. Sometimes being feared can keep you safe.”

Then she sighed, her hand rubbing slowly and dragging back over her hair—now a shag almost down to her jaw. She’d taken to wearing a black bandanna tied around her forehead, to keep the fringe out of her eyes. “I wish we could do away with all of that. But they don’t know anything else. They’ve…he raised them all, generations of them, on nothing but hunger and thirst and fear. And his precious, all-consuming war.”

“Capable would say they can learn. Look at Nux!”  
Furiosa gave her a small, tired smile. “Yes, look at Nux. The one Warboy out of how many dozens of dozens who didn’t want to throw us back to Joe and his wolves.” She looked away, her face going sad for a moment, then her eyes turning hard. “How long will it take them all to unlearn all of that? How long until they’ve spit up all the poison?”

~

Furiosa wanted to send the Vuvalini around to investigate the Citadel, to come back and tell her how she thought they could begin to fix the place.  
If anything could be salvaged.

For the most part, the remaining Warboys and the pups—and even Joe’s own son, Corpus Colossus—regarded Furiosa with something akin to awe.  
Corpus Colossus, who must have now realized that his life was in Furiosa’s hands, and that she could, at any moment, have one of the Vuvalini put a bullet in his brain, or have him shoved from a window, and there would be no one to protest. 

There had been rumblings that he would take over, but these were squelched almost immediately when Furiosa—backed by the Sisters and the remaining Vuvalini—came back and began exposing the former Immortan’s lies. Now no one there would believe a word he said; he was of no more importance or concern than any one of the other newly liberated People of the Wastes. 

~

“That’s got lead in it,” the old woman said.  
The Warboy currently bent over, about to apply a coat of the chalk paint to a pup who was 2000, maybe 3000 days old, looked at her like she had said a tree was growing from one of his ears.

“What? It’s jus’ our paint,” he said. “Gotta put on a base coat, for primer. Make sure it don’t rub off too easy.  
“You put that on ‘im, you cut his life in half every time,” she said, firmly. “Made of lead.”

The Warboy made an ugly face. “What do you know, old buzzard? Piss off, I got thirty more pups need to be chalked up before sundown!”

“You want him to grow up covered in lumps, with mush for brains? Fine! Slather the whole lot of them with poison then,” she said.  
She turned and left in disgust; Toast just stood there staring, trying to decide what to do.  
Eventually she settled on saying, “The Imperator’s…advisor has ordered you not to paint this pup. Use only the chalk.”

She stood there, her hand lightly touching her rifle, until she saw him put the lid back on the can. He grumbled as he hammered it back in place, then gave her an unreadable look, before picking up the chalk bucket and the rag sachet already heavily dusted with chalky clay, and began daubing it onto the little one’s bare skin. 

“Gonna come off by tonight. Waste of time…”

But the rest of the pups stared after her as she left, with eyes wide with fascination. 

~

“You really think that’s why they’re all…like that?” Toast asked the Vuvalini woman, later.  
They were up Topside, at one of the training ranges. This was a long, narrow chamber carved into the stone, with a wall of scorched, pitted rock rising at the other end. The ceiling was open to the air, and the sun came in as a long, vicious slice. Previously, the more elite Warboys had practiced there, and now Furiosa had requisitioned it for their particular use. Scattered here and there were bits of targets that they had blasted to pieces with their explosive lances—which they, of course, called thundersticks, because naturally EVERYTHING had to have a ridiculous name. But at the absolute farthest end there was a dummy, cobbled together with scrap, with some dirty white shreds of rags for hair, and part of a bent sheet of metal wit a crudely-drawn breastplate on it.  
Toast had asked the old Vuvalini woman to teach her to shoot properly. 

“’Course it is,” she said, her mouth a hard line. “Lot of poor boys, stuck in those chop shops all days, huffin’ glue an’ exhaust an’ who knows what else. And covered head-to-toe in poison paint almost from the time they can walk It’s no wonder none of them ever tried anything against that old bastard. Too sick, too brainwashed, too poisoned.” She shook her head. “So many mothers’ work, and for what?”

Toast started to say she’d never thought of it that way--but of course she hadn’t. The Warboys were just a constant back-beat to everything in the Citadel; they ha been Joe’s attack dogs, his scouts, his workers, his everything. 

It never occurred to her that at some point, some woman somewhere could have WANTED each of the Warboys; that down there among the Wretched—the People of the Wastes—there might still be women living, looking up, desperate for a glimpse of a familiar face, a nose, a chin, any sign that one of them was hers. 

Joe threw them away like trash, had them kill themselves like ants trying and failing to stop a lizard from raiding their nest.  
It had not occurred to her that their lives—their very creation—had once been someone else’s life’s work.

She only came back to the present when she realized the old woman had not spoken in awhile.  
“Deep thoughts, there, little sister?” the old woman asked.  
She could only nod. After a studying moment the older woman nodded, as well, and then nudged her arm. “Might be wise to save ‘em for later. We’ve only got another good hour of daylight for practice,” she said.  
Toast nodded, then hefted her gun again.  
Her arms and shoulders were already staring to ache, but the pain gave her practicing a sense of urgency and near desperation.  
She squinted down the sights, bit her lips, and squeezed the trigger.

The first shot went wide, biting into the stone behind the dummy-Joe’s left shoulder.  
The Vuvalini, to her surprise, made an approving noise.  
“If he’d feinted to the side, you’d’ve put it clean through his heart. Exhale before you pull the trigger.”  
Toast did as she was told, and this time was rewarded with a metallic clang and a tiny spark as the next bullet punched through Dummy-Joe’s shoulder.  
“Good, good. A crippling shot. He’d not be able to use that arm in that state. How fast can you reload? In the time it’d take him to--”  
Toast turned to her with a half-despairing look. “Are you—are you just messing with me because I’m a terrible shot? Or--or trying to be nice?”

The old woman only raised her eyebrows at her. “If you were a terrible shot, you wouldn’t have hit it at all! I haven’t got the time to lie to you, sweetheart, and I see you aren’t the type to need coddling.”  
“I know how to shoot,” Toast said. Then, embarrassed at her rudeness, she mumbled, “I THOUGHT I knew how to shoot.”  
“Pistols an’ rifles are different beasts altogether, my girl. Let me tell you something.”  
Toast shouldered her rifle, and they walked to a bench cut into the rock and sat down.  
The second she was seated, she could eel the ache in her back, all the way up through her shoulder-blades and up the back of her neck. She was going to be TERRIBLY sore the next day, she realized.  
The thought filled her with pride rater than nervousness.

She looked over at the older woman, expectant and curious and a little guarded.  
The Vuvalini sad, “If you cannot land a head shot, a body-shot is better than nothing. You can’t expect to be a sharpshooter overnight when you’ve only dealt with pistols before. It isn't the same. Don’t beat yourself up over not being perfect at something you just started learning; it’s a sure way to ruin things.”  
Toast sucked in a huge breath and nodded a few times. Finally she asked, “So…you really don’t think I’m terrible at this?”  
The woman gave her a wry look. “Well, your dummy over there, if he was a man, would have a thumb-sized hole in his shoulder he’d be bleedin’ out from. So no, I don’t.”  
Toast blurted out a little laugh; the woman followed suit.

~  
(Furiosa, on the Vuvalini’s advice, starts giving out gs masks to the shop boys.)

“Like the Immortan,” one of them murmured. He touched the mask reverently.  
Furiosa’s eyes were like knives. “No. Like people who want functioning lungs. From now on, if you’re working with that shit, you cover your nose and your mouth. Do you understand?”  
The Warboy nodded so hard his head looked like it could come off.

“You’re all gonna be full-life now, do you hear me? But you have to follow instructions. You don’t, and you stay half-life,” she said. “And you will NOT be dying historic, you’ll be dying of lumps or bleeding lung.”

Toast knew Furiosa was smart, but this was genius.  
The Warboys loved rumors and any shred of news never stayed at the source long, among them; she knew that in less than an hour, the whole Citadel would be buzzing.

~

“Then…if the wordburger says it’s true…” Nux said dubiously.  
Toast shook her head. “Wordburgers say a lot of things that contradict each other.” She paused, felt saddened when he made a sad face of incomprehension, and then said, “That go against something another one said. This one here said people used to think the whole world was flat, like a…like a brake disc or something!” she said, jabbing her finger at the book in question.  
“But the story,” he said. “Thor an’ Loki an’ all them.”

She sighed, shaking her head. “All Joe did was steal the stories and pretty them up to use them to trick you guys. It doesn’t prove Valhalla is really there. And it doesn’t say anything at all about the Cult of the V8.”

Nux frowned, but didn’t put the book down. Instead, he said, very quietly, “Can I stay here and read the rest of this? Just--just for tonight, I promise!”

She sighed, feeling tired and not understanding entirely why. She nodded. “You can stay as long as you like. Capable invited you, didn’t she? You can even sleep in here, if you want.”

~

Slit kicked at his chains morosely, but this time did not snap at the old woman who came in with the food.  
“You gonna act civilized, now? Like you’ve got some sense in you?”  
He snorted.  
“In civilized places, people thank those who’ve done ‘em favors.” she continued.  
When he looked up he could see her hands were on her hips. The rifle was slung low across her back; he knew it would take her valuable seconds to whip it up and pull the trigger, but he also knew from what he saw in the desert what she could DO in a few seconds; that she wouldn’t hesitate to put one of the bullets through his eye if he twitched the wrong way.

Shitty, rust way to go--wearing nothing but soft pants, his arm all swaddled up like a leaking pipe, with chains round his ankles. He looked like a feral bloodbag waiting for processing.  
He didn’t say anything.  
She sighed, then made a weird clicking noise with her tongue. “You don’t even know how to do that, do you?”

Then he bristled at being called stupid; called stupid by some old feral bike-raider, not even a Buzzard, not even a breeder!  
“Do YOU know the right ratio of black powder to graydust you need to make a thunderstick with max explosiveness?” he snapped. He was tired of her making him feel stupid, like he was some pup who’d just finished reassembling an important piece of machinery all wrong. 

She shook her head. “Don’t need dynamite. I can take a tick off a rat at three hundred meters, boy, so you can just calm down with all of that.” then she was silent.  
He reached out and took the bowl, moving slow so she didn’t decide to clap him at the last second.  
He told himself this wasn't him going soft, and they hadn’t broken him; he was just hungry, and you couldn’t run a war machine without fuel. He’d get free next time, then really show them how much better dynamite was, than some old rusty relic of a rifle. 

“Two words, and you don’t know ‘em, do you?” she asked.  
He gave her a look, trying to figure out if she was making fun of him or being serious.  
Instead of responding, he just started eating, sticking his good hand into the stuff in the bowl before registering it was hot and jerking his hand back, swearing.

“What the fuck’s wrong with the food?” he hissed.  
She raised one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”  
“It’s—it’s got stuff floating in it! What IS that?”  
“’S just a bowl of greens, boy. Calm yourself.”  
“What the fuck are all these little orange things?” he demanded. Maybe she HAD been sent to poison him; to give him some kind of weird, soft food that would make him weak and rust and useless. 

When he looked back up at her, he could see her face looked sorry. He didn’t have a name for that type of face--not really--but it made his guts tighten in mingle shame and guilt, an he wasn't even sure why.  
“Those ‘orange things’,” she said, speaking very slowly and patiently, the way some of the older Warboys did with really slow pups, “Are carrots. Got lots of nutrients your body needs, to help you heal proper. And it’s nice and hot, to help warm you against the chill in here. Nux tells us you won’t accept more than the one blanket.”

He was silent for a beat, sucking on his burnt fingers. Whatever was in the bowl was savory, and bitter, but in a strangely nice way, without the almost sickly-sweet tang of their usual chow. The little orange things were just barely firm to the teeth, yielding to a mushy sweetness so unexpected that it made the inside of his scarred cheeks sting.  
Then he said, “If you’re tryin’ ta make me weak, I ain’t gonna fall for it. I may be a half-life, but I ain’t a half-wit.”  
That would show HER. He wasn't stupid. 

But instead of getting angry and cussing him, she just gave him that weird look again. Then she shook her head and stepped backwards out of the door.  
Before she swung it closed behind her, she said, “It’s ‘You’re welcome’.”  
“What?”  
“That’s what you’re supposed to say, when someone does you a kindness, boy. You’re welcome.”

~

But when he dropped the wrench for the third time, he bent over snarling.  
He barely managed to get his voice in check before speaking to her.  
“When’s my hand gonna stop fucking up?”

She looked at him, then made the weird clucking noise again, and made the weird sorry face at him.  
“Could be three months—that’s 90 days—could be three years—could be never. You wouldn’t let us set it straightaway; might never heal right.”

“How am I s’posed to DO anything, then?”  
She gave him a bland look. “You ain’t supposed to be doin’ anything now, ‘cept eatin’.”

Then he sat down and ate the bowl of steaming greens one-handed, before something occurred to him with a jolt of horror sharper and brighter than a lightning bolt in a sandstorm.

“You—you said it might never be repaired?”  
She made a noncommittal noise and shrugged one shoulder.  
“I’m a lancer,” he said, slowly, like he was explaining it to a pup. It wasn't like he could throw a lance with his teeth.  
Then the light came on in his head.  
He startled backwards so hard he nearly kicked the food over, leaping to his feet and scrambling backwards until his back hit the wall.  
This sent a jolt of pain through his fucked-up arm, which he realized he may have fucked up worse without his even knowing.

Later he would deny this ever happened; but in the moment, looking down t his bandaged arm—his fucked-up broken arm, which he had fought them when they tried to set it—he sucked in a huge, wavering breath, and brayed his next words like a pup about to go full Chernobyl, “I’M A LANCER!”

She just looked at him, with that sorry, sad face, as he stood there shaking and heaving and staring at his arm like it wasn't his anymore. 

He managed to get three huge breaths in and out before bawling again, “I’M A LANCER!”  
And then he half-turned and in a frenzy of grief slammed the side of his head against the wall, howling at the top of his lungs.

“Stop that! What’re you doing, boy? Stop, you’ll bash your brains to a pulp!”  
He kept repeating himself, screaming as loud s he could, until he’d hit his head enough times to dizzy himself, and slid to the floor.  
She was on him a moment later, pulling him away from the wall. Her hands were like leather, and in a moment she had him in a submission hold he couldn’t have broken from unless he’d had both his arms working and no chains. But her grip was gentle, his face in the crook of her arm almost like a hug. 

She was shouting for help.  
Slit went completely limp.

~

They took him back down to the Organic’s, after that.  
But the old Blood Shed didn’t even look like itself; there was no smell of blood or shit or vomit, and the stone slabs seemed to have been replaced by metal benches, about waist-high.  
A Warpup with a stitched gash over one eye was sitting squirming playfully on one of the benches, but he froze and looked over at Slit, when they half-dragged, half-carried him through. His eyes were wide with awe.

Slit hardly noticed him. In a moment they’d hustled him onto one of the metal benches, padded out with a length of sun-bleached cloth.

“This the violent one?” one of the old women said.  
“The very same,” Maddie replied. “Lost a lot of his fire, he has. He won’t eat unless you watch ‘im. Says there’s no point in ‘wasting chow on a rubbish rust Warboy with a fucked-up arm, doomed to die soft an’ never see Valhalla’.” Maddie said. Then she snorted. “Ain’t even so bad as all that. Or it wouldn’t be, if he’d let it alone for longer’n five minutes.” 

Slit listened to them with a kind of obstinate hatred. He was going to die soft and they wouldn’t even let him die soft in silence. 

The another old woman was leaning over him, her gloved fingers gentle on the side of his face.  
She winced back hissing after a moment. “He’s still wearing all that?” she asked.  
Maddie made an affirmative noise. “Wouldn’t let us wash it off.”  
“Does he know it’s poison?” Slit figured this must be the woman who was the Vuvalini Organic Mechanic.  
Maddie leaned over him, looking him square in the face. “Stubborn boy. Doc Rosa here wants to know, do you know your paint is poison?”

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so re-reading this now, i'm just...annoyed at myself because the story is very much "wehhh what about the boys" when the movie was clearly a takedown of that kind of thinking. I had a lot more planned, more growth for all the Sisters, more explorations of Citadel life, more...everything...then life got busy, and...well.


End file.
